Tess

Abstract

In the previous chapter I have looked at the ways in which Tess might be said to have been threatened by a number of ‘captures’ – (a) by a series of social structures (territorial, despotic, capitalist); (b) by two quite different regimes of signs (despotic signifying, authoritarian passional); or (c) by two quite different configurations of desire (sadistic, masochistic) – all of which she manages to skirt and transcend in her nomadic line of flight. Nevertheless I have left undiscussed what is without doubt the most powerful strategy of capture of all and one the provides the novel with its major structural scheme. This is what I want to call the ‘phantasmatic capture’ of Tess because it is a capture that can be best described in terms of the model of the ‘phantasm’ first elaborated in their seminal paper of 1964 – ‘Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origine du fantasme’1 (translated into English in 1968 as ‘Fantasy and the origins of sexuality’2) – by Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis and later developed by Deleuze in his Logique du sens of 1969.